Страница 34 из 74
He is a man who has to bend to do that. With a lot of men, it might be the natural place to kiss Nina, when she’s standing up. But he is tall enough to bend and so deliberately kiss her in that exposed and tender place.
“You’ll get cold out here,” he said.
“I know. I’m going in.”
Nina has never to this day had sex with any man but Lewis. Never come near it.
Had sex. Have sex with. For a long time she could not say that. She said make love. Lewis did not say anything. He was an athletic and inventive partner and in a physical sense, not unaware of her. Not inconsiderate. But he was on guard against anything that verged on sentimentality, and from his point of view, much did. She came to be very sensitive to this distaste, almost to share it.
Her memory of Ed Shore’s kiss outside the kitchen door did, however, become a treasure. When Ed sang the tenor solos in the Choral Society’s performance of the Messiah every Christmas, that moment would return to her. “Comfort Ye My People” pierced her throat with starry needles. As if everything about her was recognized then, and honored and set alight.
Paul Gibbings had not expected trouble from Nina. He had always thought that she was a warm person, in her reserved way. Not caustic like Lewis. But smart.
“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t have wanted it.”
“Nina. Teaching was his life. He gave a lot. There are so many people, I don’t know if you understand how many people, who remember just sitting spellbound in his classroom. They probably don’t remember another thing about high school like they remember Lewis. He had a presence, Nina. You either have it or you don’t. Lewis had it in spades.”
“I’m not arguing that.”
“So you’ve got all these people wanting somehow to say goodbye. We all need to say good-bye. Also to honor him. You know what I’m saying? After all this stuff. Closure.”
“Yes. I hear. Closure.”
A nasty tone there, he thought. But he ignored it. “There doesn’t need to be a hint of religiosity about it. No prayers. No mention. I know as well as you do how he would hate that.”
“He would.”
“I know. I can sort of master-of-ceremony the whole thing, if that doesn’t seem like the wrong word. I have a pretty good idea of the right sort of people to ask just to do a little appreciation. Maybe half a dozen, ending up with a bit by me. ‘Eulogies,’ I think that’s the word, but I prefer ‘appreciation’-”
“Lewis would prefer nothing.”
“And we can have your participation at whatever level you would choose-”
“Paul. Listen. Listen to me now.”
“Of course. I’m listening.”
“If you go ahead with this I will participate.”
“Well. Good.”
“When Lewis died he left a-he left a poem, actually. If you go ahead with this I will read it.”
“Yes?”
“I mean I’ll read it there, out loud. I’ll read a bit of it to you now.”
“Right. Go ahead.”
“There was a Temple of Learning sat
Right on Lake Huron shore
Where many a dull-eyed Dunce did come
To listen to many a Bore.”
“Sounds like Lewis all right.”
“And the King of the Bores was a Right Fine Chap
Did Grin from Ear to Ear-”
“Nina. Okay. Okay. I got you. So this is what you want, is it? Harper Valley P.T.A.?”
“There’s more.”
“I’m sure there is. I think you’re very upset, Nina. I don’t think you’d act this way if you weren’t very upset. And when you’re feeling better you’re going to regret it.”
“No.”
“I think you’re going to regret it. I’m going to hang up now. I’m going to have to say good-bye.”
‘Wow,” said Margaret. “How did he take that?”
“He said he was going to have to say good-bye.”
“Do you want me to come over? I could just be company.”
“No. Thanks.”
“You don’t want company?”
“I guess not. Not right now.”
“You’re sure? You’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
She was really not so pleased with herself, about that performance on the phone. Lewis had said to her, “Be sure you scotch it if they want to bugger around with any memorial stuff. That candy-ass is capable of it.” So it had been necessary to stop Paul somehow, but the way she had done it seemed crudely theatrical. Outrage was what had been left up to Lewis, retaliation his specialty-all she had managed to do was quote him.
It was beyond her to think how she could live, with only her old pacific habits. Cold and muted, stripped of him.
Some time after dark Ed Shore knocked on her back door. He held a box of ashes and a bouquet of white roses.
He gave her the ashes first.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s done.”
She felt a warmth through the heavy cardboard. It came not immediately but gradually, like the blood’s warmth through the skin.
Where was she to set this down? Not on the kitchen table, beside her late, hardly touched supper. Scrambled eggs and salsa, a combination that she’d always looked forward to on nights when Lewis was kept late for some reason and was eating with the other teachers at Tim Horton’s or the pub. Tonight it had proved a bad choice.
Not on the counter either. It would look like a bulky grocery item. And not on the floor, where it could more easily be disregarded but would seem to be relegated to a lowly position-as if it held something like kitty litter or garden fertilizer, something that should not come too close to dishes and food.
She wanted, really, to take it into another room, to set it down somewhere in the unlighted front rooms of the house. Better still, in a shelf in a closet. But it was somehow too soon for that banishment. Also, considering that Ed Shore was watching her, it might look like a brisk and brutal clearing of the decks, a vulgar invitation.
She finally set the box down on the low phone table.
“I didn’t mean to keep you standing,” she said. “Sit down. Please do.”
“I’ve interrupted your meal.”
“I didn’t feel like finishing it.”
He was still holding the flowers. She said, “Those are for me?” The image of him with the bouquet, the image of him with the box of ashes and the bouquet, when she opened the door-that seemed grotesque, now that she thought of it, and horribly fu
Those are for me?
They could as easily be for the dead. Flowers for the house of the dead. She started to look for a vase, then filled the kettle, saying, “I was just going to make some tea,” went back to hunting for the vase and found it, filled it with water, found the scissors she needed to clip the stems, and finally relieved him of the flowers. Then she noticed that she hadn’t turned on the burner under the kettle. She was barely in control. She felt as if she could easily throw the roses on the floor, smash the vase, squash the congealed mess in her supper plate between her fingers. But why? She wasn’t angry. It was just such a crazy effort, to keep doing one thing after another. Now she would have to warm the pot, she would have to measure the tea.
She said, “Did you read what you took out of Lewis’s pocket?”
He shook his head, not looking at her. She knew he was lying. He was lying, he was shaken, how far into her life did he mean to go? What if she broke down and told him about the astonishment she had felt-why not say it, the chill around her heart-when she saw what Lewis had written? When she saw that that was all that he had written.
“Never mind,” she said. “It was just some verses.”
They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy. What had been between them, all these years, had been kept in balance because of their two marriages. Their marriages were the real content of their lives-her marriage to Lewis, the sometimes harsh and bewildering, indispensable content of her life. This other thing depended on those marriages, for its sweetness, its consoling promise. It was not likely to be something that could hold up on its own, even if they were both free. Yet it was not nothing. The danger was in trying it, and seeing it fall apart and then thinking that it had been nothing.